Inevitable
by Fyrefly
Summary: In every possible universe, Blair Roche dies." One-shot prosetry, WK/BR. AU…ish. It may sound foolish or trite, but I promise it’s clever. I think.


**Title: Inevitable**

**Rating: T for romantic implications and possible squick factor**

**Summary: "In every possible universe, Blair Roche dies." One-shot prosetry, WK/BR. AU…ish. It may sound foolish or trite, but I promise it's clever. I think.**

**Disclaimer: I watch the Watchmen. Well, and read them. But that's pretty much all I do.**

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

It is 2010 on the planet that I left.

I am standing over the dusty stars and clusters of an unnamed nebula, sculpting columns and spheres from the dense gases and cobbled light. Time does not pass the same way here, in hours and minutes and days that revolve quite literally around the Earth's specific sun, but by the time my heart has beat 604,888 times, I will have molded a foundation suitable for small yet elegant lifeforms.

I measure time now not in solar units, but in the sound of my own pulse, the shift of glimmering particles rotating before me.

It is all the same to me.

My name is Jon Osterman, and I no longer see things the way other men do. It is 2010 and I have found a place suitable for my new creation, with the appropriate elements easily available and a young star of its own.

At the same time, it is 1959, and Jane is handing me a beer, the condensation cold and slick as our hands touch.

It is 1966 and I see Laurie for the first time, though she has been haunting my constant existence for years. My hands will frame her face like a seashell, a piece of fresh fruit: precious.

It is 1969, and Jane is crying. She will leave me.

It is 1985, and Laurie is heading out the door.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

The universe fits together in a beautiful clockwork, but sometimes the intricacies are too much for me, overlapping in strange places, folding together. Sometimes I remember fondly a time when I simply moved through the days without knowing what would come next. Since then, I have found that the patterns often seem to revolve around broken love.

In 2010, creation has become a form of mediation for me. I have created inanimate objects before, on Mars, and I am ready to begin again. I imagine making _life_ this time. Making roses. Trees. Eventually, perhaps, humans: the thermodynamic miracle; gold spontaneously spun from oxygen.

It has taken a long time to find this place, where the elements are conducive to my undertaking, where there exists another perfect star. I am wrapped not in silence, but in the soft infrasonic hum of the universe, in the sound of my own heart. I have long ago learned the benefits of steady breathing—even when I do not need to breathe. Of solitude and quiet—never mind that one heart beating is a lonely sound indeed.

When I am suspended in silence, and when I empty myself of what little remains, the universe unfolds for me. It flowers, like skin shelling off an onion. I can see the patterns of things: how they have spun out in the past, like wool on a spindle; how they will spin out in the future, a web of stars.

Every layer is one fine piece of parchment over another: the writing shines through.

It is 1985. Walter Kovacs is a smudge of ash on the crisp snow, and I have made him that way. I have burned up every cell from the inside, quickly and painlessly, a bright flare. It is only the crowning glory of the slow immolation he has been experiencing for years now. The man was but a husk, scorched through on the inside, and I have only given him that which he has begged for—not only in his final minute, but also as a child cowering from his mother, in a home for unwanted children, and in every labored breath since Blair Roche died.

I do not understand morality as other men do, but I am not disassociated from compassion, or mercy.

Still, it is a time I return to again and again. Like the cold beer in Jane's hand, or the look on Laurie's face when she asks for my real name, I find myself back here: it is 1985, and every subatomic particle in Walter Kovacs is howling for death.

Since I have become the man I am today, I find that of so many of my fellow vigilante comrades, it is Walter Kovacs who most fascinates me. Adrian Veidt will always hold himself above the populace; Dan Dreiberg to the side. But it is Walter who puts his hands to the earth; misguided though he may be, he is one with the people. Once, he said that if the city begged to be saved, he would deny them. But when the last day came, it was Walter alone who stood against Adrian, who fought—knowing it was in vain—for justice for the millions slaughtered.

In Walter, I see clearly demonstrated a kind of human potential which is not apparent in others. It is raw and unformed, and he is rough and prone to great flaws in his judgement, but he is also, I think, the clay from which great things could be molded.

Now, as I sit in this vastness of space, contemplating the life I will create, I see his face—his masked face, alongside his human visage—reflected in the mirrored panels of a hundred disentangled possibilities, in worlds that have existed side-by-side, next to each other, parallel. I read his story in them. I examine the creases in the maps, to see what has turned him from a coarse young man of infinite promise to the angry, lost creature he has become.

I find that he remains nearly the same in every crevice of history, and, intrigued despite myself—despite the fact that it matters little, perhaps not at all—I search until I find the missing puzzle piece: the piece that fits. It seems inevitable, that his story play out this way.

In 1966, I breathe in the scent of Laurie's sixteen-year-old body, willow-slim, as we sit on a rooftop. Simultaneously, almost twenty years later, she walks out the door. I never want to lose her. I know I always will.

For Walter, it is the same. In every possible universe, Blair Roche dies.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

It is 1971, and in one universe, they are childhood friends. They are almost the same age: she is ten; he is twelve. They attend school together. She is kind to him in the cafeteria and favors him with a sweet, solemn smile. She has pale white hair, sleek as silk, and eyes like sloes: dark, glistening. She wears pigtails, and a pale blue dress. It is the first smile young Walter has received so freely, and he does not understand what it does to him. But when the bigger boys tease her on the playground and pull her braids, tug at the old lace trim on her sleeves, he attacks them with a savagery that almost surprises even me. Instead of his first brutal fight taking place in an alley with other embittered boys throwing insults, it takes place in a schoolyard as an act of chivalry and in defense of a lady's honor.

Blair is kidnapped four years later. This time it is not a mistake, and they do not take her because her last name is _Roche. _It is a man and a woman who peddle pedophilia together, and the police know she is taken but cannot track her fast enough. The couple, who know the police are on their heels, take photos which will be in circulation forever, an eternal blight and insult to her innocence and childlike beauty, and then they kill the pale wispy girl and dump her body in a gutter. This is where the law finds her: Walter Kovac's best friend. His only friend.

In Walter's mind, this law is inept, and he seeks his own vengeance years later when he catches the two, still peddling their porn, with horrible, sadistic pictures of the young Miss Roche filling the private files under their bed.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

In another universe, Blair is born five years ahead of Walter. She is orphaned, and they meet in the home. Walter does not trust her, for he is used to the harshness of his mother, her crassness. But lovely Blair, with her shining pale hair like a beacon in the dingy shadows of the home, smiles at him gently. After a time, when she knows he no longer views her as a threat, she speaks quietly to him: mild, meaningless words of kindness. When he struggles with homework, she helps him, and when he comes home with bruises and cuts she cleans them, even though he protested and fought her bitterly the first time she tried. He grows accustomed to the light touches on his shoulders and within the year he has tentatively adopted her as a big sister, though he hides this truth even from himself. Simultaneously, she is a mother to him, a _true_ mother, unlike the woman who bore him.

She leaves the home. She enters a two-year program at a nearby college. He visits her after school. Soon he is on his own as well, but he doesn't pursue a formal education: he works at a nearby dress shop instead. He doesn't tell her that the hours are long, the shop is cold, and the pay is poor. He doesn't tell her that he picks her up from work every evening because he worries about her. He doesn't tell her she can't cook worth a damn, because she is his sister and his mother, and he wouldn't hurt her for the world.

Most notably, he doesn't tell her when he takes up the mask.

He begins and ends his patrols outside her apartment building, just to make sure she is safe. He watches her carefully. His watching does not protect her though—not when she most needs it. She is mugged on the way to work early in a winter morning.

It is 1975. He blunders past the police and the caution-tape when he sees the red of her scarf on the gray pavement, the white silk of her hair—a beacon once more. The snowflakes that melt on the cracked wet cement do not give way on her flesh. They cluster on her lashes like stars. They dust her cheeks and the blue-shadowed hollow of her throat, and they clot there in tiny drifts.

They do not melt, and this is how he knows she is dead.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

In another universe, she is the heiress to the Roche Chemical Foundation. She is wealthy and privileged, and Walter does not know her at all. In this world, her rich parents are hardened and embittered, and they refuse to ransom their little girl. They will not give in to terrorist demands. They instead place the child's welfare on the already-overburdened shoulders of the police, and they wash their hands of it.

Walter sees her solemn six-year-old eyes on the news and wonders at the wisdom in her gaze, which belies her youth. He thinks it is a mark of the end-times, that parents no longer care enough about their children to offer anything—their lives, if necessary—to save them. Then he thinks of his own mother and no longer feels pity. He goes to the dress-shop. He prowls the city at night. A few weeks later, a little girl's leg-bone is found in the city, picked clean, marred by canine teeth. On the news, they say they've found her—that the child was hacked limb from limb while still alive, and then fed to dogs. Scraps of her little sleeper, with bears on it, were found in a furnace nearby, with traces of semen on the fabric.

The man who kills her is nowhere to be found, and what's more, the police don't even know where to begin searching.

It is 1976 and something inside Walter howls now, day and night. He was lax in his duties. He did not take care. He did not hunt for her. He did not save her.

He did not keep watch.

In this world, he does not remove his mask at all, not once over the course of the rest of his years.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

In the fourth layer of the infinite universe, Blair Roche takes the place of Kitty Genovese, and she is butchered outside Walter's door while he is out traversing the city, pretending to be a mask. He knows her: she lives down the hall from him, and he thinks she is lovely and demure. She has been coming into the dress shop to be fit for a dress made from the changeable material that he finds so alien and beautiful. He thinks she will be ravishing in it, with the white fabric the same platinum shade as her hair, and the dark designs echoing the almond-shapes of her eyes. She praises his work but says the fabric washes her out: she believes she is too pale and homely for patterns of white and black. When he comes home and finds her sprawled against his doorframe, dead for hours and without a glance from the neighbors who knew her so well, he takes the dress and rends the fabric in his hands. It is 1974, and in an act of madness, he fashions his mask and wears it for her.

In the fifth world, she is kidnapped again. These universes often run in similar rivers and veins. Walter knows her father, but he does not know Blair. However, her father is a righteous man, a good Republican and a solid citizen, a laborer and a bus driver, and for his sake Walter will try to find her.

It is 1977, and Walter fails.

It is 1975 in the sixth world, and Blair Roche is an intellectual and a liberal, everything he despises. But she has been kind to him when she sees him on the streets, toting his sign, and when her apartment is broken into and she is kidnapped in some inconsequential political game, he takes it upon himself to return the favor of human benevolence.

He fails.

In the seventh universe, it is 1972, and there are no masks. Blair is just a little girl who lives nearby, and though he is just a little older than her he finds her annoying. There is never any romance between them, but he grows to think of her as a sister, someone he can hold on to and take responsibility for. Someone to anchor himself to when his mother is being vile.

Someone to take care of.

She is kidnapped this time not for her name, but because she bears an unfortunate physical resemblance to the nine-year-old daughter of Maeve McFadden, heiress of the McFadden Steel Company. It is the snow-pale hair, sleek as silk, and the wide dark eyes. Her tiny frame.

When the kidnappers realize their mistake, she is not fed to dogs but sold to a brothel on the western coast. They might as well get _some _profit, after all. Young Blair does not survive the week.

Walter does not know this. No-one does. But he searches for this would-be sister his entire life, until he tracks down her body and the bodies of thirty-some other children, boys and girls alike, as well as the men and women responsible for the travesty. It is 1994 and he is in his mid-thirties when he finds this place, and the small flame of hope and decency that has been sustained in him through all the vilest of childhood traumas is suddenly and irrevocably extinguished.

He fails.

It is 1977, and Blair Roche is old, and a mentor to him. He is fascinated by her dark eyes, and as he learns the path of the masked vigilante, he vows to protect this frail-boned old woman. Instead, she is beaten by miscreants behind a grocery store.

It is 1972, and she comes in to the shop with her mother for a dress for her confirmation. He is young and she is younger; he still drowns in her eyes and the light of her hair. He waits for her to grow up. Instead, in 1979, someone drugs her, and her body reacts poorly to the chemical. She dies.

In another universe, he is nearly fifty before he meets her. She is only twenty-three but she wants to show him the world, for all her solemn expressions and mild smiles. She is raped outside the dress shop. He fails to protect her.

In the eleventh universe, he fails. In the twelfth, he fails.

In every possible universe, he fails her.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

The thirteenth story, though, is my favorite of Walter's paths. I have examined and re-examined why; perhaps because I see in him most clearly myself, destined to lose Laurie from the moment the world unfolded. Perhaps it is because he travels from such extremes of hopeful love and bitter despair. In my own way, I am fascinated by these two things. It amazes me, so often, that a human being can host such a range of emotions. It seems that one small body could never be enough to hold them all. One more reason to believe that each human is a miracle in and of themselves.

Especially these two. Let me show you.

It is 1973. Walter Kovacs is making a coat. It is a gift for a stepmother, and it has been commissioned by a young Miss Blair Roche. This Walter is harder than some of the others, but—like them—he is not fully Rorschach yet. He cannot be, of course, while Miss Roche still lives.

He does not like her. He has decided this the moment he meets her. Her eyes are too dark and wide: they pull him in. Moreover, he _wants_ to be pulled in.

He thinks she is trying to seduce him.

Perhaps she is, in a way. The shop is cold, though the lighting is good (better for fine stitches), and his fingers crack. The front office, where most business and transactions take place, is well-heated for the comfort of the customers as well as the boss, but Miss Roche always likes to see what she is getting and insists on looking at the unfinished project. In the back of the warehouse, she watches Walter with great, still eyes like darkened wells, and breath puffs from her mouth in clouds of stardust and frost.

He glowers at her, and then turns back to the needle.

She comes afterward, every few days, to check on the progress. There is no rush, she tells the manager—there is plenty of time, and dear Mr Kovacs should only work on it when he is not occupied with other projects. One day she sits down across from him, unbidden, and slides a styrafoam cup full of dark, caffeinated sludge toward him. He stares down at it, as though it is an alien thing—and maybe it is, for surely such a dense, muddy liquid was never intended for consumption on this planet.

But also, it is a kind of gift, and Walter has as much experience with those as he does with interplanetary beverages.

"It tastes foul," Blair says, and the left side of her mouth curls just a bit, sweet and too serious to be a smile. "But if you hold it in your hands, it'll warm you."

As I watch from outside the transparent wall that separates us, I think no truer words have ever been spoken. Then again, I am not thinking about coffee—but other, less-tangible things.

Walter hesitates, then glowers, and he does not pick up the cup. She continues on in the same way she has always done, fingering the drapery of the coat on the mannequin beside him, as though she hasn't brought him this offering at all. As though he hasn't blatantly rejected her gift. She leaves with the same faint not-smile, and when she is gone he rests his fingers lightly on the plastic lid. The heat seeps into his bones.

He replays the scene in his mind. He doesn't trust her, and he doesn't like her, but there is something in the quiet seriousness of her dark gaze that holds his memory. There is something waiting in her eyes, a quiet sort of sorrow. He does not want to think about her, but the thoughts come to him unbidden and fit around his mind like a worn leather glove, covering all the cracks. Surely a girl with an expression so sweet and sad is not the kind of woman he must avoid. Perhaps she has seen dark things too, as dark as he has, which make her so soft and quiet. This is not a woman who fornicates with different men every night. Nor is she paid for her services. She does not flirt lightly, if indeed she flirts at all. She does not carouse or paint her face—at least not so that he can tell—and unlike some women, she does not laugh or speak with deliberate volume in order to garner attention.

No. Walter sees there is something deep in her, something old.

From my place outside of things, watching the events unfold, I too wonder about the solemnity of her gaze, the quiet half-smiles. She has somehow come to understand the way of stillness, the power and calm it brings. Unlike me, she did not have to disintegrate and put herself back together to do so.

Also unlike me, she does not meditate. Rather, it is as though her every thought and action is a meditation in and of itself.

Perhaps something in the sweet Miss Roche knows she is destined for one specific fate—that of a violent death—and that it will come to her eventually, no matter how hard he tries to protect her. Perhaps she has accepted that, even though it is not a series of past lives I am reading but rather a string of lives _right now_, all running alongside each other in a relatively concurrent manner. Blair Roche is here, and here, and here, and here—and in each place, she _knows_ that she is going to die.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

The next time she visits, he does not look at her, but he picks the cup up from the table while she watches and takes a sip. She is right: it is a foul, medicinal sludge, but the heat of it is grudgingly welcomed. He wishes for a dozen packs of sugar, or a score of sugar cubes: he likes his coffee like syrup. Still, the warmth of the styrafoam burns his fingers, not because it is extremely hot but because he is extremely cold. He thinks the frigid temperature will never leave his marrow.

The muddy substance blazes a path down his throat; it's so bitter he coughs, just a bit, and clears his throat, then turns back to his work. The coat is to be made of thick green wool, in a more feminine military style. He has never met Blair's stepmother, but he tries to imagine how it would look on Miss Roche herself: demure, modest, but still so very flattering. Heat rises in his cheeks and he is just thankful she doesn't have any more intimate clothing projects for him.

She returns again, and again, and finally one day he takes the cup directly from her hands. He notices that her fingers are long and fine, the nails neatly rounded and short, unpainted. His own calloused fingers touch hers—on accident, he tells himself—the rough texture skating lightly over her smooth knuckles. She blushes—just faintly, with no artifice or guile—and turns her solemn eyes from the cup now in his hand to his piercing gaze.

She thinks that his eyes look right into her and through her, turn her inside out, take her apart in pieces—and then, remarkably, put her back together. She lets out a slow breath, tension easing from her shoulders, and smiles at him. The winter has gotten deeper in the last few weeks of her visits; the sun sets early now. It is already dusk and he says, after a moment, "It's not safe to walk home at night in this city." They are the first words he speaks to her in this world.

Her smile returns: brighter, more real, more present. Perhaps she has forgotten the pricklings of her imminent death. "What do you suggest, Mr Kovacs?" She is younger than him—not as young as in some universes, but enough. He is in his early-thirties, and she has only crested her second decade on this planet. For a second, he hesitates in the face of her mildness and apparent innocence.

"You could stay," he says roughly, jaw clenched, eyes on his work. He continues to stitch. "I could walk you home, when I'm done here."

Her fingers touch the back of his wrist lightly, just her index and middle finger. They are so gentle he almost can't feel them through his cuff, but the sight of her hand on him arrests him and makes him flinch.

"It's very kind of you, Mr Kovacs. If you're certain, I would gladly stay."

He falls silent, still and stiff until she draws her butterfly-light fingers away, and then he continues with his work, not answering her. She stays, and she doesn't speak or try to force him to conversation. She wanders through the mannequins, looking but not touching, her hands clasped demurely before her waist or behind her back. He watches her from the corner of his eye, and when he is done, he puts on his coat and shoves his hands deep in his pockets, making it clear that he has no intention of letting her get close or of touching her. She walks next to him, and if the hush between them starts off as awkward, then by the time she has quietly guided him to her apartment, it has become something companionable and easy. Walter is privately amazed by this: by her willingness to be silent, to contemplate, to share her companionship without some pressure to talk, to open, to touch, to give. She has demanded nothing from him, and it's an alien concept for him.

And she _is_ lovely, truly.

He watches her silently from the sidewalk as she opens the door of her apartment building, lifting one hand to him in a solemn wave. He can see her take the stairs through the window, and when she doesn't appear in the stairwell again at the fourth floor, he waits to see which light is switched on the third. The sixth window to the right lights up; her slim figure appears and the brief flash of her pale hair, and then she is pulling the blind down, and her silhouette appears against it.

He begins his rounds of the city outside her apartment later that night. He is curious about her now, his attention piqued by her quiet camaraderie on the way to her home. He has never been so comfortable in another person's presence before, especially when in such close proximity. Adjusting his mask over his face, he looks up at her window, assuring himself that she is still okay. He is surprised when he sees the slender shadow of her again, framed against the blinds. Before he realizes what she is about, she has pulled her sweater over her head.

Though he is harder than other Walters I've seen, and he still feels dirty, this Walter is simpler, more innocent than he will be after Miss Roche dies and he experiences more of the hardness of the world. Now, he watches the delicate shape of her form through the shade pulled across her window. He flushes under his mask as she reaches around to unclasp her undergarments, and the figure of her unfettered body sets his mind whirling. He takes a blind step back, almost off the curb, before ducking his head quickly in shock and hurrying away, unfamiliar with the heat coursing through him. He is ashamed. She has been nothing but proper with him, and kind, and he believes he has sullied that with base lust.

Two days later, she comes to visit him again in the shop, murmuring genuine words of praise over the near-finished coat without embarrassing him or being false. He wishes suddenly, fervently, that it isn't so close to completion. He has become used to her presence every few days, the hushed, gentle companionship she gives out with open hands. Haltingly, gruntingly, he offers to walk her home again, and this time he walks closer to her. Once, he bumps against her hip and flushes, but she doesn't seem to notice. He wonders how, exactly, one is supposed to go about asking a young woman out to dinner in an entirely appropriate and polite sort of way. He doesn't ask, though—he hasn't the courage for it yet—but he does say goodnight to her this time.

It's nearly a week before he sees her again, and this time it's not in the shop but on the streets. She is hurrying home from somewhere, and he is staring at the street prophets lining the corner and pondering the veracity of their warnings. She sees him, and calls out, "Mr Kovacs!" in a voice just loud enough to get his attention. She smiles at him and tells him she is on her way to pick up a bowl of deli soup and some coffee, and if he'd like to join her, she'd be happy for his company.

Uncertain, he accompanies her, and is surprised that they _do _talk over dinner. To his further surprise, he realizes after the fact that he has been the one to initiate the conversation, that his curiosity has won out. Almost greedily, he asks her questions: what does she do for a living? Does she enjoy it? What does she do when she's not working? Where did she go to school? Where is her family? What was it like, growing up with siblings? It isn't until he asks her why she isn't married yet (because Walter is still Walter, alternate dimension or not, and he still thinks all respectable young ladies should live with their parents or be married) and she laughs softly at him…that he flushes and realizes he has been undeniably improper. Even rude. Inappropriate.

But she only looks amused and tells him that she doesn't think marriage is in the cards for her; that she hasn't met the right man yet. Tenatively, he asks her what the right man is, and she gives her mysterious, sad-eyed half-smile.

"Someone intelligent," she says at last. "Serious. Quiet. Someone who is interesting, with their own distinctive story, who isn't afraid to stand up for what's right."

Walter is not sure whether he fits the entirety of that description, but he figures he's got the last one in the bag. Then he wonders why it matters to him. Instead, flushing high under his freckled cheekbones, he changes the subject and asks why she doesn't live with her father and stepmother still. He is intrigued when she says that her family is relatively poor and she feels, if she can be self-sufficient, that she shouldn't burden them. Instead, sheworks at the local library, and she visits them twice a week. On Sundays she cooks dinner with her stepmother. Her mother died when she was just a child, and her father remarried a year later, rushing to wed inspite of his personal grief because he felt his six-year-old daughter needed a female figure. Luckily, he managed to choose well, and lovely Blair grew up close with her stepmother.

Walter is impressed by the extent of Blair's sense of duty, as well as the calm and matter-of-fact way she answers his questions without flooding him with rambling, meaningless chatter. He is also drawn to the delicate high-collar of her shirt—almost Victorian, but sweeter. The cotton fabric skims smoothly over the curves of her chest. Unbidden, he recalls the shape of her body silhouetted against the blind in her apartment, and his ears grow hot. He looks away quickly.

If she notices, she's too kind—or too confused—to say , she finishes her soup and delicately sets her food aside, smiling at him gently. "It's time for me to head back home," she says mildly. "Do you have time to walk with me again?"

He likes that she has offered him a way to escape if he doesn't want to. Almost as much as he likes that she has asked him.

This time, he offers his arm to her, almost reluctantly. She is surprised, her dark eyes flashing up to his before the lightest pink touches her smooth cheeks. It is not like the fiery red that has inflamed his ears—it's a delicate blush, and if Walter hasn't been one to notice the beauty of women before, he certainly is enamored of it now.

He watches her window that night, unaccustomed to the strange tightening in his abdomen. Not that he is entirely unfamiliar with these urgings—but it has been a long time since he has allowed himself to acknowledge them. As with all things that make Walter uncomfortable, he forces himself to endure the rising heat, the deepening need. He tries to be ashamed of himself, but somehow, he can't bring himself to feel dirty this time, even while he knows that what he is doing is morally reprehensible.

She just looks so lovely and untouchable, up there in her tower.

The coat is finished. He lays it in her hands the next time she comes to visit the shop, after she has written a check to the manager in her fragile-looking script. Her hands are fine-boned; her fingers long and elegant. He licks his lips. He thinks, again, about asking her to dinner as her mouth curves in a sad half-smile at him.

But he does not.

Even when she coasts her fingers over his fine stitching and murmurs, "It is perfect," like a soft sigh. "Everything about it," she says, "is perfect."

For three weeks, he goes about his regular schedule. Up early, hard toast and coffee for breakfast, work late. Bacon and rice for dinner, more coffee, then out on the streets. Serious glances up at Blair Roche's window, catching her mid-glimpse as she pulls down the blind, or the silhouette of her reading at the table with a pen pressed to her chin. Occasionally, chance allows him to see her strip down in her utter innocence and glory.

Then on to his rounds of the city.

A few beatings, half-hearted; Walter has become distracted in his service of the city. His mind circles around thoughts of deep, solemn eyes like wells, and mouths that are warm and soft. Inviting hands, and an easy comfort. He walks more slowly through the city these days, as though matching her pace still even when she isn't there.

He ends his wanderings outside her apartment as well. Sometimes the light is already off. Sometimes he arrives in time to see her turn down the lamp, or slip into her nightdress, silhouetted against the window. Lately, he feels like a nomad in the city, a lone ship, and she is…she is _port_, and _lighthouse_, and _home_. For the first time in his memory, he wants to rest in safe harbors.

He might even take off the mask, if he thought it would get him closer to her.

And then one day, she is walking back into the shop, with snow and sunlight escaping in around her, as though it longs to touch her as much as he does. He stares. Shyly, blushing, she brings him a satin dress with a faded pattern in black and pink. The shapes remind him vaguely of his own mask.

"I would like this mended. The seams have come loose," she says, flipping the edge of the dress up to show him. He looks at her sharply—the fabric has been ripped in a way that looks deliberate. And then, with the rose-color high in her narrow cheeks, she confesses haltingly, "This is a blatant excuse to see you."

If he wasn't caught before, he is now. His lips twitch against his better judgement. He slides the faded, cheap satin through one calloused fist, his eyes on hers, and says only, "I'll have it ready for you tomorrow."

The brief hour he spends bent over the sleek pink-and-black fabric has his mind slipping back to her quietness, her honesty, her innocence. It is possibly the most subtly erotic—and most humbling—experience he has ever had: to stitch together the seam of this dress, where it will carress her thigh.

And she has sought him out to do so.

When she returns the next afternoon, he has made up his mind. He asks her to dinner. Somewhere clean, well-lit, with respectable clientele who will act as unofficial chaperones for her honor as well as his own. She accepts, her sloe-eyes growing brighter, as though she has been given something unexpected and precious. For the first time since he has known her, a full smile spills over her face. It reminds him of candleflames.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

It is moments like these, when Blair Roche is taken by surprise at the beauty of life—and more grateful for it than any other human I've met—that I become more certain than ever that she knows she is going to die.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

He has dressed carefully today and takes her out directly afterward. Blair wishes she would have been able to go back to her apartment and put on something newer, and less _librarian_ in style, but she is afraid to take the time lest he change his mind and disappear.

One dinner turns into two, and five, and a few weeks go by in this vein. Walter has never cared much for money, and usually stores it in a coffee tin under his sink—not because he hoardes it, but because he has nothing else to do with it. He is a man of simple tastes, and his job—though far from a lucrative career—easily pays the rent and keeps him in rice, bacon, and coffee. Now, though, he finds himself looking forward to a paycheck, wanting to take her to nicer places. Ironically, her own tastes are as simple as his in many ways, and she doesn't need candlelight or wine to appreciate the effort he is funnelling into their relationship.

One night, she asks him if she can cook for him. Simple though her tastes may be, her diet is not restricted to rice and bacon. She plans on small steaks, and spinach salad, and mashed sweet potatoes. At first, he is alarmed and appalled at the idea of joining her in her apartment. It's unseemly, and dangerous. For a moment, he flashes her a glare of disappointment, but the look on her face—hopeful, guileless, everything that is the opposite of conniving—keeps him from saying bitter words he would doubtless regret later.

He tries to think of a kinder way to refuse, and perhaps to gently admonish her, when she says softly, "I know you are outside my apartment every night anyway. I thought you might as well come in."

Heat rushes to his ears. Had she known he was there when she undressed? Had she been aware of his presence, watching her perversely?

And how had she recognized him?

As though reading his mind, she whispers, "I can never see your face, under the hat, but the stature is the same, the way you hold yourself." And, even more quietly: "It makes me feel safe at night."

Her words send a rush of heat and an alien sense of pride through him like a lance: piercing, slim, precise. He swallows a shudder. He doesn't know if it's because he has made her feel protected…or if it is because she has recognized him from a distance, just by the set of his shoulders.

Walter goes home. He showers. He shaves. He puts on a button-down shirt, with tiny rust-colored stripes running through it. It is faded and old, but it is one of the nicest shirts he owns. Then he goes to her apartment.

He debates telling her about his mask, explaining why it is he keeps watch over her every night. Thinks that perhaps he should let her know not to be alarmed. But then, she hasn't been alarmed so far—the opposite, in fact—and she never asks him questions that will make him uncomfortable. It's part of what he finds so precious in her: that she makes no demands. There is no bartering, or expectations.

He does not mention it.

Instead, they dine. They talk freely now, and comfortably, and their conversation is all the more meaningful because it is underlined by a thoughtful quiet. He helps her with the dishes, despite her protestations, and finds something achingly domestic in how her hands dip in and out of the water. He thinks he could stay in this small apartment with her forever. His own is nearly empty, dingy because of his own lack of interest, but her little nest is a bright place in spite of its ragged furnishings. It is clearly a home. He imagines waking up to this place, and it makes his breath catch.

"Is something wrong?" she asks, her deep eyes full of concern.

He shakes his head, unable to speak. _This is the room where she curls up and reads at night. The table where she eats her breakfast. The desk where she writes. The room where she slips out of her day-clothes and into a nightgown, and creeps softly into bed._

At the door that night, he kisses her. It is awkward and faltering—his teeth click against hers—but it does not lessen their shared passion, barely restrained by their individual modesties. He keeps his palms, flat and broad and warm, on her slim shoulders. He doesn't know what else to do with them, and anything he could think of would be highly improper.

Still, there come other opportunities to experiment.

Blair works twelve-hour shifts at the library—four a week, when she's lucky enough to get overtime. On her days off, she wanders down to the shop to meet him after work. On the other days, he sits in a couch and reads until the library closes, and she slips her small hand in his elbow.

They do not touch skin in public. Still, it's close enough for him to feel her warmth, and close enough to build up the tension and delightful anticipation inside him. He walks her home. Sometimes he goes inside with her. They share dinner. She reads to him from one of her books. They talk, or sometimes, they just sit. When he leaves, they kiss. His hands have found their way to her waist, her hips, the small of her back. Once, shakingly, he brings his palm up to cup the nape of her neck. His fingers twist in the sleek strands of pale hair there, and she quivers against him. Her own hands travels his gaunt cheekbones, then trace the cords in his neck. Sometimes, gently, she will span the width of his shoulders.

He knows he will marry her. It is the only suitable way to have everything he wants: her pale freckleless skin pressed smoothly against him, her mussed hair spilling on his pillow every morning. Her quiet camaraderie, and the true delight he sees in her as she takes in the world around her.

Blair Roche knows time is short: she sees all, and finds quiet pleasure in the smallest, most insignificant of things. Walter Kovacs has never seen anything like her simple appreciation in his bitter, sallow childhood, and he wants it in his life now and every day.

At some point, he notices the leather-bound journal on her desk. He asks if it is a diary, and she says it's not—that she writes poetry in it, or the starts of books she'll never get a chance to write. He asks her why not, but she has no answer for him: only sad, haunted eyes. The closer she gets to Walter, the sadder she seems. There is a bit of a doomed air about her now, but it only serves to make him want to protect her more.

Poor Walter. Keep in mind, in this world, he is still in many ways naïve of the tragedy that can befall good people.

He touches the leather of the journal, mentions that he used to keep one when he was a child in the home, before he decided all his thoughts were worthless. His voice is gruff, deliberately careless.

But Blair takes note—she always does.

Spring comes. Summer comes. Autumn once more. It is 1974, and it is wintertime once again. Blair invites him to share Christmas with her family, since he has none of his own and nothing but bacon and rice and coffee to go home to.

Her father is, by Walter's criteria, a good man. Republican, a bus driver. He laughs a lot and has a larger belly, but he doesn't look _soft._ The stepmother is blond and plump, and much more animated than her quiet, solemn-eyed daughter. There is a true affinity between the two women of the house, though. There is delight in their eyes when they speak to each other, and real affection.

Her young half-brother is obnoxious, but obviously dotes on his sister. Walter prays the boy will grow out of his annoying stages, and soon. There is another child—a girl, a few years younger—who is as golden and laughing as her mother. Blair stands out among the laughing, loud family: a stately lily amongst the shining daffodils and marigolds. Still, her love for them is obvious, and mutual. Walter is uncomfortable, but also fascinated: he loves this new perspective of her, this glimpse into her life. He loves trying to figure her out, when nothing is clear.

He also notes that she is wearing the pale pink-and-black faux-satin dress he mended for her, the one whose seams she had ripped out nearly a year ago in an admittedly successful attempt to see him again. It has a high collar, which she has left unbuttoned just enough to show the little silver dove on her necklace and the hollow of her throat. The sleeves come to her elbows, snugly, and the black belt shows the narrowness of her waist. The skirt flares and flutters around her knees and he remembers his fingers caressing the inside of that seam, the one that lies against her bare flesh even now.

He takes her home after it is dark. To his surprise, no-one attempts to mug them. About halfway back to her apartment, he feels a sinking sensation—as though they are being watched, or as though fate has already begun to move the chesspieces according to the tragedy that must play out.

She invites him up to her apartment. A year earlier, he might have been offended; now he knows that sheis not trying to seduce him. Instead, she gives him a present as he sits on the worn old couch: a leatherbound journal of his own, rich caramel-brown and soft. Walter has never been one for excessive words; still, he finds himself _incapable_ of speech at this moment. On the first creamy page, she has written:

_Because your thoughts are __never__ worthless to me._

_blair_

Her name is uncapitalized; there is no flourish in her signature. Just a note, a statement, but it is as clear to him as though she'd signed it "with all my infinite love" and added hearts and flowers. There has never been such freely-given, genuine kindness in his experience. It is a first for him, as was the original styrafoam cup of coffee.

As was her kiss.

He pulls her against him on the couch. This time, his rough fingers skate down her hip, traveling the familiar resewn seam. He can feel the heat of her soft flesh through the fabric, which catches delicately on his callouses. Her hair smells like honey; her skin, like Ivory soap. His fingers slide across her leg, leaving a streak of warmth and latent electricity in their path. The edge of the dress rides up and he can feel the fiery smoothness of her thigh, her bare skin. Her skin is softer than the fabric; he is almost afraid it will snag on his rough hands—

They break away, breathless, panting. Both are flushed, and her sleek white hair has become tangled from his hand at the back of her neck. Blushing in his ears, he makes his excuses—which sound suspiciously like apologies—and moves to leave. At the door, she brushes her lips lightly over his. Somehow there is an infinite sadness over her dark eyes, as though she has suddenly glimpsed the end.

"Don't be sorry," she urges in a whisper. And then, in an echo of the words she had once laid at his feet after he finished her stepmother's coat: "It's perfect. _Everything_ is—_perfect."_

Walter, somehow, does not realize the words are a deathknell. Time passes, but the universe cannot be fooled. Fate and inevitability must come to fruition.

It is 1975. You know this date. By springtime, Walter has decided how he will propose. He will say, "Your goodness and honesty overwhelm me." He will say, "The scent of your hair…" No, no. He is no good with words, with sentiment and romance. He sits at his table and writes carefully in his journal, scratching out more than he keeps. He will say, "After a day like today, after the past months. After everything we have shared, both exciting and mundane, I have only become more and more certain that I want to spend every day in this way, for the rest of my life."

_The rest of his life. _He doesn't know how long that will be, if he continues to be a mask. Being a vigilante has been the only thing he has been certain of since he was young, but now he is distracted, and Blair Roche has become his Polaris. A mask now only seems like a way to cut short the life he is suddenly looking forward to.

Perhaps he will tell her that. He crosses out the first proposal, writes a new one: more honest, more rough and raw. To his untrained eye, Walter thinks it is less romantic, but that is only because he has never trusted his own heart very easily and doesn't know the power it can wield—especially against a woman like Blair, who is already more in love with him than he could ever comprehend.

The money comes out of the coffee tin. He cannot afford the kind of diamond he wants: something colorless and clear, with minimal flaws. The ones in his price range are murky and milky, with feathery intrusions running the length of them. He purchases a pearl instead: white, unblemished, perfectly round and lustrous. It glows with some hidden inner fire, and it reminds him of her hair, the luminosity of her skin—the feel of her thigh, briefly, under his fingers.

He tries to plot out his proposal again. Ink splotches cover the pages of his journal, so similar to his mask. He crosses things out, wavers back and forth between the passionate mundane and the more impersonal romantic.

Understand that I have witnessed many, many things in my years, especially as I watch the universes unfold. There is lust, and there is love, and then there is Great Love. I assure you, this last is the rarest of all. But once upon a time, just a few worlds over, Walter Kovacs had it.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

It is 1975. He is ready to propose. He has developed some of the most lovely words I have ever heard. He is no Neruda, of course, but his language is beautiful in the very rawness of it. It is honest, and truthful, and gritty. When Rumi writes poetry, it is as though light spills from his pen and leaves illuminated rivers on the parchment below. When Walter Kovacs pens his proposal, it was as though the words have been engraved in stone.

He intends to see her in the morning. Breakfast, which is her favorite meal of the day. There is a café which makes a decent cup of coffee and a fair, sweet, buttery stack of pancakes that Blair delights in. He will rewrite the smeared page in his journal: make it neater, more legible. He plans to tear it from the book and fold it tightly, hide it in his sleeve just in case he can't remember the words. With the sun coming in the broad café windows, flooding them with its pale copper light, he will ask her.

He is thinking all this, plotting and planning, as he prowls the city that night in a half-distracted way. When he is done with his rounds of the city, he stops by her apartment, looking up. His brow furrows under his mask. The light is still on.

Concern wars in his insides, followed quickly by self-doubt. He is too caught up in her, seeing ghosts where there are none. Worrying needlessly. He steps away from the apartment building, hesitates and steps back.

_The light is still on._

He gauges the set of the moon, where it is slung low in the sky. It should be around three or four in the morning—he has walked a long time, trying to settle his restless thoughts. There is no way, no reason she should still be awake.

Perhaps something troubles her. Perhaps thoughts way heavily on her mind, as they have on his.

He debates going up to her. No; innocent though it may be, he will not jeopardize her good reputation. There is only one reason, in the minds of the multitudes, that a man enters a woman's apartment at three in the morning.

Reluctantly, he turns away. At his own building, he glances around discreetly, then takes off his mask and shoves it in his pocket before entering.

_The light is still on._

He drifts into a fitful sleep, the sight of her lit window haunting his dreams. He imagines the sleek shadow of her body against the shade—and wakes. He envisions a struggle, the lamp smashing, the window going dark—and he wakes. He sees her pinned to the bed, being raped, no shadows to hide the atrocity committed against her. He imagines her tied to a chair as burglars loot her house, laughing. He wakes and wakes again.

By dawn, he has decided that his time on the streets has jaded him. It has gotten deep in his brain, and painted its unsavory pictures all along the wall of his mind. He still has not decided to give up the mask for certain, but the idea is looking more and more alluring.

He takes the page from his journal. He has memorized what he will say; nonetheless, he folds the paper and tucks it into the cuff of his sleeve. He takes the pearl ring out from the coffee tin under his sink and slides it into the inner breast pocket of his coat.

He leaves.

He reaches Blair's building and buzzes her apartment. The silence that greets him is so hard and bright he can almost see it, taste it. He takes a step back and looks up at the window. In the pale sun of morning, he can't tell if the light is on, but her shades are usually pulled up with the dawn. Today, it is not.

A stranger comes out of the building and Walter catches the door, easing himself in. He walks up the stairs. His footsteps are not as loud as his heart. It pulses in his ears. He can't hear anything else.

The door of her apartment is open, just a bit. The lamp is on, but tilted on its side. Chairs are knocked over; the coffee table is skewed and the porcelain teapot has been knocked to the floor. Even the couch has been shoved to one side; her desk is shuffled. The phone is dangling off the hook and half-torn from the wall.

It is 1975, and Blair Roche's journal is on the floor.

For a moment, Walter staggers. He is lost. _This is a crimescene,_ he thinks. _This is a crimescene._ He knows what to do with crimescenes, but he can't remember. He moves slowly. He picks up her journal. He straightens the lamp. He plucks the receiver from where it dangles in midair, hangs it up, and then dials her parents.

They are sobbing. They have just been called by a mysterious voice which has demanded fifty million dollars, which they do not have, which they have _never_ had. He tells them he will be over immediately. He is. The police are there. He tells them he tampered with the scene. They look at him suspiciously, but nothing comes of it. The Roches cry. Walter does not.

A local detective tells them he believes they have been targeted because of their last name. That they have been confused with the family that owns Roche Chemical Company. Why else would kidnappers ask for fifty million? _No-one_ but the Roches of chemical fame had that sort of money.

The police ask more questions. They promise to do their best to find her, and then they leave.

Walter tells the Roches in hushed tones that he has a friend—a masked hero. That his friend will find her. They look at him with such hope in their eyes—the chocolate-brown of Blair's stepmother's, the blue of her father's—and he feels the pearl in his pocket weighing him down. The paper in his cuff itches. He does not tell them he was going to propose.

Instead, he promises them that Rorschach will be in touch.

Walter goes home. He stares at his hands: the freckles, the hairs like copper-wires. He can see the blue of his own veins through the fragile skin of his wrists. He has a slight abrasion, where the paper of his proposal has irritated the flesh there.

Detatchedly, he debates dinner. It seems like a foreign thing to him, something unnecessary, a waste of time. He's too caught up in the memory of light reflecting on Blair's sleek hair, like milk. On the pearly luminescence of her skin, flawless against his own. Her soft sad smiles, the heat of the styrafoam coffee cup, her generous gifts, her appreciation for every layer of life. Her hands, delicately holding the pen as it hovers over her journal.

His fingers burn with the memory of her silken thigh.

He pulls on his mask and tucks the proposal back into his sleeve. When he finds her, he will ask her to marry him. He feels the pearl in his pocket like a barbell, a cannonball, a bomb.

He ducks past the tape across her apartment door. He examines every nook and cranny. He finds a fiber of black thread that the police must have missed. He notices a bloodstain on the back of the couch—three streaks, as though from fingers. He imagines pretty Blair, clawing some villain's face, the blood catching under her nails and smearing on the fabric.

He goes outside. There is a bum drinking on the corner.

"Who did you see here last night?" he rasps, his voice like gravel.

The lush looks at him blankly.

"Who did you _see?"_ he asks fiercely.

The drunk's eyes roll back and he passes out.

He goes to one of the bars he used to frequent for information. He hasn't been absent from them, but his visits in the last year have been notably fewer and more disinterested. Now there is a dangerous passion in him once more.

He breaks fingers.

He breaks larger bones as well.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

I have mentioned before that I do not understand morality as other men do. As a crimefighter for the United States government, I was often called to commit actions which seemed to me not particularly _good._ I also recognize that I no longer fully comprehend the intricacies of human behavior, so perhaps I am mistaken. Even so, I do not know what to make of this Walter's ferocity. Is he right, to do such things in the search for the woman he loves? I think of Laurie, thin as a sapling in my arms, and what I might do to keep her heart beating, if I could.

As I mentioned before, sometimes I remember fondly the days when I didn't know what was coming next. When there was the illusion that I might change things.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

It is 1975 in this other world, and the bartender is terrified. Rorschach has always been a frightening apparition for the beasts in this pub, but now there is a new savagery firing his words, a kind of horrifyingly deliberate intention. When the masked vigilante has finally left, amid broken tables and spilled-over chairs, there is the hushed whisper that Rorschach has finally lost his mind.

Walter, in his Rorschach mask, hunts the city. He prowls. He is everywhere at once. His eyes are hungry beneath his mask. He has become a hunter.

I am unfamiliar now with the concept of envy, but I think if there was one thing I could be envious of, it would be Walter's ability to live only in one time at once. After all: it is 1966 and I am kissing Laurie. It is 1985 and she is walking out the door. I have known since before I met her that I would lose her; I have met that inevitability with the very knowledge that it is, in fact, by its very nature: _inevitable_. But Walter, fierce in his rage and fear, can lose himself to the fervor of the unknown.

I watch him. He does not attend work. He stalks the city instead, day and night. Sometimes he does not sleep—going back to his apartment seems, to him, to be a waste of valuable time.

Bacon and rice take too long to cook. Coffee, too. Pausing on a rooftop, he rolls his mask up over his nose: his face is sweaty underneath, itchy and stubbly, but the time it would take him to shave and shower is time wasted when he could be tracking Blair. He quickly wrenches open a can of beans—cold—and eats them swiftly. Instead of caffiene, he pops a few stony sugar cubes in his mouth. The sugar hits his bloodstream quickly: he is half-starved at this point, after all.

And he is out again, retracing his old steps, looking for new clues. Unwashed, underfed, he is burning up with the force of his own ferocity. Every cell in his body is a funeral pyre. Human odors cling to his clothes. His coat and cuffs have become dirty.

It is 1975 in this universe. You know this date.

It is around this time that Blair Roche _always_ dies.

Walter stumbles over the truth, to be honest. A scrap of fabric he recognizes, caught in the chain-link fence. It is crusted with dirt and faded, woven in the rusted gate. He had fixed the cuff on this blouse once, blushing as he did so, and now he recognizes the delicate pattern that was once embroidered on it.

There are dogs in the backyard, growling at him. They are feral, angry. One has, locked between his forepaws, a large and splintered bone.

Walter does not allow himself to process this fact. Not yet.

He breaks through the window and clambers in. His limbs are long and pointy, pared down by weeks without proper meals. He folds in almost like an insect as he draws himself into the house. It is dark and dingy inside, but almost painfully normal. Still, there are hints: the dark stains in one corner. The axe leaning against the wall. He goes to the small heat-stove in one corner. He opens the door and leans in.

At first he sees nothing. I could tell him, for I have seen what has happened here: how they drugged her. How they cut her from limb to limb. How—after a few strokes—the drugs were not enough and she woke screaming.

But then he reaches into the stove. His hand finds small smooth pebbles and fibrous things, a tiny patch of scorched fabric. He jolts back, then kicks the stove over, tearing the pipes, spilling cindery ashes out onto the floor. The pebbles are teeth; the fibrous tendrils are pale, pale strands of hair, the ends singed and crimped and darkened by heat. The fabric of cloth is from her embroidered collar.

It is 1975, and Walter _knows._

The images come to his mind—some true, some based on the horrors of his own imagination as it overtakes him. He sees the world through her eyes in her final moments. Was she awake when they cut her apart? Does she see the dogs fight over her severed limbs? Does she look down and wonder where her own legs were? Does she cry? Scream? Is she already dead when it happens? He sees her looking down with that solemn, dark eyes of gaze—seeing herself legless, armless. Just a trunk of a body and wide, pain-filled eyes, red-streaked hair—

It is not the image of blood that stirs his pain, though. Those thoughts only numb him. Instead, spiralling through him like the thinnest, lance, he remembers of the feel of the flesh on her thigh, sleek and molten, and thinks of it growing cold. He imagines the faint pulse in her neck—_stopping._

_Don't,_ he thinks. _That way lies madness._

The ring in his pocket is its own small world. It is a planet full of pain.

It is 1975 and Blair Roche is a hill of soft ash and teeth.

It is 1985, and Walter Kovacs is a smear of cinders on the snow.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

It is 1951 in this universe, this one which we are in _right now_. 1951, and Walter Kovacs is cornered in an alley. He burns a boy's eye out with a lit cigarette. I am in my third year of studying physics at Princeton University, learning the cogs of the universe on a subatomic level.

It is 1956, and Walter's mother dies. He is unperturbed, and leaves the home to work in the garment industry. I am preparing to graduate with a PhD. In three years I will begin work at Gila Flats.

It is 1964, and I decline my government costume. Kitty Genovese is murdered, and Walter takes up the mask. Two years later, Laurie will meet me for the first time. I say she will meet me, because I have always known her.

It is 1969, and as my father dies, Blair Roche is born. She opens large, dark eyes to the world, and there is something solemn and silent in her first unfocused glimpse of the world.

_She knows._

It is 1974, and Ms Stephanie Roche walks into the dress shop with her little daughter in tow. The girl looks up at Walter and offers him a sweet, sincere smile. He is calmed by the quiet in her eyes and offers his own subtle twitch of his lips, a softening around his eyes. He is, by his own admission, still "soft" at this time. While Ms Roche talks to the manager, Blair looks curiously at Walter's work. Something in him unfolds at the sight of her: how dangerously trusting she is, how attentive and small.

Briefly—a flash that he quickly dampens—Walter wishes he had known her when he was younger. Perhaps, if he had known another person to hold onto, a little sister to take care of, he would have come through this life with something other than the knuts and bolts of his own hardened heart, which he suspects is rapidly falling apart. Ms Roche comes in multiple times throughout the next few weeks. While he does not talk to the child, he finds himself growing fond of her upturned face, her great dark eyes, which are full of so much ineffable knowledge. She is, in his mind, a sisterlike flower, a delicate dream of hope. A blossom to hold on to: gently, so as not to crush it. Something to protect.

She is a reason to keep believing in the good of humanity, and to continue on in his calling.

It is 1975, and in a hundred universes, a hundred stars wink out. I watch them in unison. It is the dark gleaming of Blair Roche's eyes as they shut, the fading of the life that brightens them. It is the fire in the stove where Walter finds the bear-printed fabric of her six-year-old pajamas.

It is the faint ember in his heart, finally smothered by a little girl's ashes.

It is a decade later, and Walter Kovacs finally tears off his mask. "Rorschach" has been a shelter for him, but he can't stay locked in side any more. Every spiralling cell in his body is pleading for immolation.

I see his life unfolded like a map. The past ten years, which he experiences in a solely linear fashion, have been far too long. He has been burning up and burning out the entire time, like a meteor.

I oblige him, and all that is left is dust.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

It is 1985 and I am creating for the first time—not life, but something solid and simple, in its way. Something in me is melancholic for the familiarity of human flesh, for the sweet frame of Laurie in my arms on a rooftop. But I know, now, that I am meant to be a watchmaker—an observer of time.

I was never meant to belong in it.

It is 2010. I am creating life this time, starting fresh from the dust of unborn stars rather than the sand of a pre-made planet. The glittering particles drift where I direct them. Life is simple in these spaces, and I will fashion stone columns and pillars of trees. I will separate the firmament from the waters. There will be gleaming fishes and wet flowers, and things on tiny hooves. Before long, something more complicated. People, perhaps. I will give them the spark of life.

It is 1966 and I am kissing Laurie on a rooftop. It is 1975, and Walter is hollowed out over the powdery, soot-like remains of a child, a woman, a friend, a lover, a sister, a mentor, a dream. It is the way of the universe that all things are made from such starry ash, and to that same form they will return. Electric impulses flare; tiny flames burn. The synapses fire. Oxygen flares into gold. All life burns up.

I do not often indulge in fantasies. There is not enough space for them, when you already know how every small things fits together. Still, I like to remind myself that—in the shifting of these new foundations, in the grains of golden elements that I myself am molding together and building—there are, after all, limitless possibilities. The thermodynamic miracle: oxygen into gold. Amidst the gleaming cinders and flakes, I am putting things together: delicate cogs and organic flywheels, woven light, loess and silt from across the universe.

Perhaps, by my hands, some part of them will find each other: Blair Roche to Walter Kovacs, ash to ash, dust to dust.

**wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww**

**A/N: This oneshot was so hard to write, and so very fun. I hope it wasn't boring—the narrative voice is very distanced, for obvious reasons, and there were times that I worried that it was too dispassionate. I also recognize that this is not written in a typical "fanfiction" style and for that reason may not be everyone's cuppa; it's okay if you don't enjoy it. I won't hold it against you. :)**

**Toying with Jon's narrative voice was so much fun, and I hope I got it right. I think he very much lends himself to a lyrical format and delightful repitition. I also thought, being—well, semi-omniscient—that he made the perfect omniscient narrator for an "alternate universe" fanfiction in a way that was somehow relatively in keeping with the original timeline. Ha. I have to also say I think that Jon's character is beautifully tragic and alone, and gives itself over to conversations in ethics, philosophy, and religion of almost any variety...as well as **_**love, **_**of the deepest sort. It was very difficult to match the voice of a character who I believe is deeply emotional but who does not express it in conventional ways, and I am not always sure I was successful.**

**I tried to keep my timelines straight, especially in the "authentic," true-to-the-comic "epilogue" portion. Again, I am not sure if I was successful. Please let me know of any errors you may otice; I can't guarantee I will rewrite the 'fic but if possible, I will try to rework those inconsistencies.**

**I will excuse some of Walter's softnesses by pointing out that he is younger and more naïve, and (obviously) has not yet undergone the transformative experience of Blair's death. I chose Blair, rather than crafting a completely original character, for many reasons: because she had a strong impact on his life; because I can emphasize the plurality of their relationships across space/time; because while I am not necessary well-versed in **_**Watchmen**_** fanfiction I do not believe I have seen this explored before, and also—perhaps mostly—because I love the reflection of Blair to Walter, as well. With her death, we see Walter **_**reborn**_** as "fully" Rorschach—and as her remains are burnt away, so are his, decades later (not to mention that as Jon ends one life, he then departs to create others). I think there is great symmetry in this. Perhaps, like Jon, I have a fondness for symmetry.**

**As an aside—and please, don't be offended; it was just so much fun to do:**

**Some of you may recognize the line about separating the firmament and waters as an adaption of a line from the book of Genesis. As for the opening paragraph: when Jon measures time in his heartbeats (604,888), they equal out to just about sixish days (for an average male, which of course, he isn't). **

**Which leaves him the seventh day to rest. ;)**


End file.
